Word: grunion
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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George snapped a carrot-stick in two. "We are the generation of tranquilizers and mushroom clouds, grunion hunters and men's magazines. We are born, we go to college, and then what? In the age of surrealistic art, in the butt-end semantics of Joyce and the discordant lilt of Stravinsky we are somehow yet conservative. We stand marking time, unimpressed, hands skin-deep in mental hip pockets...
...believe it, but I was young. I was proud. I went out on the great intellectual grunion-run, and I was diverted. I wandered through the alley-ways and knocked on brown-wood doors, and was admitted. Once inside, I watched the men speak lines and gesticulate, and somehow failed to understand. Beside a soundless stage my doubt played the part of a fool, incapable, strutting in a stupid pride, mute, dead, responding to a pair of strings attached to twitching thumbs...
...brazen rascals: fraudulent attorney, flimflamming explorer, dissolute college president, amoral private eye, cozening operatic entrepreneur, horse doctor posing as a fashionable neurologist ("Either this man is dead or my watch has stopped"), bogus Emperor of France?using such aliases as J. Cheever Loophole, Captain Spaulding, Professor Wagstaff, Detective Sam Grunion, Otis. B. Driftwood, Wolf J. Flywheel and Napoleon. Whatever the alias or whatever the rascality, he was always the same rascal, the con man who made no bones about the disdain he felt for the suckers he was trimming...
Groucho as Sam Grunion, astigmatic private eye, narrates the story. Fabulously valuable hot diamonds are accidentally stolen by a kleptomaniac tramp (Harpo) on a foraging trip for a group of starving young actors. The seductive Madame Egelinka (Ilona Massey) and her two musclebound minions try to recover the jewels from Harpo throughout the rest of the picture while Chico, a piano-playing mind reader wanders aimlessly about complicating things...